Build a valuable company without sacrificing your values.
We help leaders and their product development teams build great tech organizations that grow and thrive long term.
We help you align your organization so you can create great products, great results, and a great place to work.
Most tech companies fail to achieve their full potential.
It takes longer to ship new products and features.
Leaders are frustrated because getting new products and features out the door seems to take forever. Teams are hesitant to give estimates. Technical debt is rampant and no one seems to have a plan to tackle it.
It is harder to gain and retain customers.
Despite best efforts, customers just don’t seem impressed with the latest releases. Competitors have features that are stealing them away. A competitive advantage is unclear and hard to articulate.
Internal conflicts get in the way of progress.
Unproductive conflict over resources and priorities causes endless cycles of finger-pointing and debate. Dependencies between teams create incongruous priorities and product roadmaps that don’t line up. Good people are leaving to work elsewhere. Morale is down.
Successful technology companies are guided by a clear sense of purpose rooted in their values.
It is no longer enough to simply “create value for our shareholders.”
These days, your company must stand for something. You must be clear about what kind of impact you want to have in the world, and how you will make a difference in people’s lives. Your customers demand it. Your employees expect it. Heck, even your investors want to see it.
We help technology leaders and their product development teams get on the same page.
Leading a technology organization is uniquely hard. We get it.
We’ve helped companies large and small develop great digital products and take them to market.
We’ve helped companies transform from top-down command and control organizations to fast, flexible, customer-centric teams.
Boost Delivery
Supercharge your product delivery teams so they get more valuable work done faster and more efficiently minus the low morale and burnout.
Delight Customers
Discover exactly what new products or services your customers really want—and beat the competition in giving customers what they want.
Align Leadership
Align your leadership team on your vision, strategy, and objectives and communicate them effectively to everyone in your company.
We empower companies to break the limitations of 20th century industrial thinking and build the organizations and teams of their dreams.
Startup Patterns is a technology and leadership consulting company with deep roots in Silicon Valley but with a track record that spans the globe.
Founded in 2016 by Sam McAfee, Startup Patterns provides technology leadership training and coaching with an emphasis on human-centered design, lean product management, agile software development, and mindful leadership.
We have helped many companies build and scale new digital products, find product-market fit, and scale and improve product development capabilities.
We believe in leading with our hearts.
We are committed to creating better and more healthy organizations as a path to healing the world. Consulting work with great values-driven organizations is our way of contributing to a better and more just society.
We embrace honesty, creativity, empathy, and mindfulness. We eschew dogma, rigidity, and complacency. We have turned our backs on the top-down command and control leadership styles of the industrial era and those who lead with ego and fear. We believe leaders who can fearlessly embrace empathy and vulnerability while maintaining a clear vision and strategy are the most likely to build successful companies.
“I am grateful personally and on behalf of Evisions and our clients for the contributions you’ve made to set us up for greater success. And not just in product and dev, but elsewhere too, as your concepts and leadership guidance have permeated beyond the prescribed focus areas.”
– Joe Potenza, CEO of Evisions
How We Work
1. Diagnose the problem
Our research-based diagnostic tool gives you a head-to-toe scan of your entire organization. It measures and highlights the specific causes of friction in your company.
2. Generate the plan
Get a three-level program to move your company to the next level. It includes a prioritized action plan of focus areas and skill-building recommendations for executives, managers, and teams.
3. Get you up to speed
Our team of consultants—each an expert in product management, software engineering, sales and marketing, organization development, and leadership—will work with you and your teams to put your plan into action. We include concrete success metrics for you to track progress throughout the program.
There is no longer any debate about what makes great technology products.
Empowered autonomous cross-functional teams.
The business world has witnessed 80 years of Lean, 50 years of Design Thinking, and 25 years of Agile Software Development in the field. There is no longer a serious debate about what software product teams need to build superior products that yield positive business outcomes for their customers and stakeholders.
Where most technology leaders struggle is with how to transform their organization into an environment where teams can thrive.
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No product discovery or delivery process can succeed without a clear vision and strategy, and a set of concrete and measurable objectives. Executives must be able to clearly articulate to every team and individual in the company exactly what the strategy is and how their work will be measured against it. Without this alignment, conflict and confusion emerges quickly, and teams are unable to do the work you hired them for.
We have helped many leadership teams gain clarity on their vision, their strategy, and mission objectives in a way that enabled the rest of the organization to align for success.
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As companies grow, the old ways of working begin to break down. Complexity and communication overhead begin to exert a strong inertia on the teams. Throughput begins to decline and quality suffers. Companies must periodically review development practices, organization structure, and levels of investment in automation and infrastructure if they are to grow at a sustainable pace.
We have worked with many software delivery teams, helping to instill solid agile engineering best practices, lean metrics, and effective collaboration methods.
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Product discovery (talking regularly to customers, developing experiments to validate ideas, and working in quick iterative cycles) is now just table stakes for companies that build digital products. The basics are easy to grasp, just as the advanced practices are challenging to master.
We have worked in countless startup organizations and have trained dozens of teams how to discover real and practical customer needs and turn those needs into winning products.
Ready to get started?
Fill out our free diagnostic tool to get a detailed report on the key areas where your company can improve. It takes ~15 minutes to complete.
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